During his 20-year career as a professional boxer, Sugar Ray Leonard won world titles in five weight classes, became the first in his sport to earn more than $100 million in prize money, and helped fuel fans' interest in boxing following Muhammad Ali's retirement. In this interview he talks about bypassing boxers' traditional reliance on promoters, why he retired repeatedly, which of his fights is most worth rewatching, and more.
The ability to deliver an energizing pep talk is a prerequisite for any business leader. But few managers receive formal training in how to give one. Instead, they learn mostly by emulating inspirational bosses, coaches, or even fictional characters. However, research shows there is a science to psyching people up for better performance. According to motivating language theory, most winning formulas include three key elements: direction giving, or describing precisely how to do the task at hand; expressions of empathy, or concern for the performer; and meaning-making language, which explains why the task is important. All the evidence suggests that, once leaders understand these three elements, they can learn to use them more skillfully.
The NASCAR champion discusses the importance of teamwork at the racetrack, how technology has affected his sport, and what will determine when he retires.
For more than three decades, Andris Zoltners, now an emeritus professor at Northwestern, has been studying the best ways to organize and pay salespeople. The pioneer of sales analytics, he is the founder of one of the world's largest sales consulting firms and the author of six books on sales management. In this interview, he shares some of his insights with HBR. Companies make several common mistakes with sales compensation, Zoltners notes: over- or underincentivizing key products, setting quotas too high or too low, and underpaying top performers or overpaying people with good territories. Companies often get the proportion of incentive pay wrong, too, because they fail to account for "free sales"--residual sales they get nearly automatically. They may think they're paying 60% in salary and 40% in commissions, but if their salespeople have a lot of free sales, commissions could be closer to 15%. Overly complicated plans are also a problem. Some plans have different payments for dozens of objectives. That's too much; salespeople can focus on only four or five goals at most. Yet a bigger issue may be an overreliance on compensation in the first place, Zoltners suggests. There are other drivers of sales success--the people you hire, their managers, the design of territories. And while analytics are a useful tool, culture may prove to be an even better one.
The knock on most CEOs is that their focus is too myopic--that they're fixated on achieving short-term goals to increase their pay. If you studied results produced over the long term, which leaders would truly show strong performance? HBR's ranking of the 100 best CEOs provides an answer. To compile our list, we examined how active CEOs of global public companies performed over their entire tenures. We took a scientific, objective approach, basing our evaluation on hard data, rather than on reputation or anecdote. For each executive, we looked at three metrics: the total industry-adjusted shareholder returns produced, the total country-adjusted shareholder returns, and the total increase in market capitalization. The CEOs who made the 2014 list have undeniably been effective. On average, the top 50 have delivered total shareholder returns of 1,350% during their time on the job. That translates into an annual return of 26.2%. Adjusting for industry effects, average total shareholder returns for the top 50 are 1,161%, and for country effects, 1,087%. But the results turned in by the #1 CEO on our list, Jeff Bezos, were especially impressive. Under his leadership, Amazon produced country-adjusted returns of 15,189% and industry-adjusted returns of 14,917% and grew its market capitalization by $140 billion. We also collected biographical and compensation data on the CEOs to see if we could identify what they had in common and whether there was any correlation between performance and pay. While the top 100 have each had unique journeys to success, there do seem to be two preferred pathways: Over a quarter of the CEOs have MBAs, and nearly as many studied engineering. But in some ways, Bezos's place at the top says it all: The best CEO in the long haul turned out to be one who frequently underperformed in the short term--while continuing to make big bets on the future.
When people imagine practicing a skill or sport during "lucid dreaming," the state in which a sleeping person recognizes he's in a dream and takes control of it, their performance in that activity improves in real life.
A new study, which looks at the impact that typefaces have on learning, reveals that readers actually remember material better when it is presented in smaller, less-legible fonts. Teachers, marketers, and publishers, take note.
The South African archbishop, civil rights leader, and Nobel Peace Prize winner talks about finding the patience to overcome apartheid and how he has benefited from the prayers of others.
In 2008 Merritt Paulson announced plans to bid for the right to convert the minor-league Portland Timbers into an expansion franchise in Major League Soccer starting in 2011. Since the deal required him to renovate the existing stadium for soccer, he proposed converting a beloved neighborhood park into a stadium for his baseball team, the Portland Beavers-and he wanted more than half of the $85 million project to be paid for by public funds. Perhaps not surprisingly, the plan caused an uproar, and Paulson found himself unprepared for the intense public scrutiny and criticism that followed. Another person might have buckled under the pressure and abandoned the effort. But Paulson developed a thick skin, learned how to negotiate in the spotlight, and saw his vision become a successful reality.
Allen, the author of the best seller Getting Things Done, and Schwartz, the author of the best seller Be Excellent at Anything and the CEO of The Energy Project, are two of the world's foremost authorities on increasing personal efficiency. Yet although they agree on much, their ideas on how to maximize the output of knowledge workers are fundamentally different. In this edited conversation with HBR, they discuss their own approaches and what they've learned from each other's work, along with subjects ranging from the distractive pull of e-mail to the benefits of napping in the middle of the workday. Allen has developed a system of time management that encourages workers to regularly make to-do lists-and helps them blast through the items on them. Breaking down big tasks into smaller "next actions" can help people stay focused and productive, he argues, and multitasking is to be avoided at all costs: We have only so many resources and can do only one thing well at a time. Schwartz focuses on workers' attitudes and how organizations can help them achieve a mental state that keeps their energy high. People should work for 90 minutes and then take a break to recover, he says. They should tackle their most important task first thing in the morning. And managers should consider themselves "chief energy officers," inspiring and regularly recharging the people they lead-while remembering to meet their own needs as well.
Grockit, Farbood Nivi's online-education start-up, had only 15 employees in the spring of 2009 when Nivi's scooter was hit by a minivan, and the CEO found himself in the emergency room with a severely damaged kidney. He underwent surgery and was out of the office for about six weeks. Then, shortly after his return, he learned that he needed a second operation, which was followed by another long recovery period. Not until the following December was he back at work full time. Nivi's efforts to stay involved and keep Grockit afloat-with the help of some proactive employees-made clear to him that he needed more help in running his business. He hired a chief marketing officer and a chief business development and strategy officer, and stepped aside so that a veteran Google manager could come aboard as CEO. (Nivi now serves as president and chief product officer.) He believes that the accident changed his outlook in two key ways: He lives a little bit more for the things he really enjoys, and he's quicker to move on things that need to be changed.
For up-and-coming executives, an overseas posting has long been a rite of passage, providing opportunities not available in their native countries and experience that can be invaluable to their companies both during the assignment and after their return home. How has the Great Recession affected this formula? HBR spoke with the top human resources executives at four multinationals about how their companies are adapting global assignments to meet the demands of a changing world. Siegfried Russwurm, of Siemens, talks about the need to recruit workers who will really engage with their new culture-workers with the capacity for truly "international thinking." CEMEX's Luis Hernandez discusses personal and professional factors that can make or break an overseas assignment. In the same vein, Keumyong Chung describes measures that Samsung has taken to reduce failures, including preassignment training of various kinds. Today's economy is prompting cutbacks in some global programs, but the news is not all bad: For example, at Walmart, as Susan Chambers relates, a new emphasis on creative, shorter-term assignments is allowing more people (including more women) to obtain global experience without the major uprooting of a conventional expat assignment. It is also helping them get that experience earlier in their careers-when it can be of maximum benefit to the employee and the company alike.
Stephen Greer's Hong Kong-based scrap-metal-recycling company, Hartwell Pacific, was enjoying a period of fantastic growth in the late 1990s: Within 18 months, the firm grew from two employees to 200 and opened locations in seven countries. But Greer's experience offers a vivid illustration of what can go wrong when an entrepreneur ambitiously expands without understanding that emerging markets operate by very different rules. Greer didn't realize that the corollary to cheap local wages is a poor population that may be tempted to supplement paychecks by stealing from employers; his company ultimately lost several million dollars from employee theft and embezzlement. This episode of fraud led Greer to learn to sacrifice some growth for control, to embrace bureaucracy, and to overcome his distrust and return to the optimistic mind-set that's essential for entrepreneurial growth.
Michael Wallent, twice married and the father of three, had been working at Microsoft for more than 11 years when he decided-with the full support of his wife-to transition to living as a woman. Rejecting the standard approach at big companies, whereby the HR department announces a transgendering (often at a meeting from which the affected employee is absent), Wallent chose to inform his superiors and his direct reports himself. He also urged them to ask whatever questions were on their minds. In large part as a result of the intimate conversations that followed, Megan Wallent's management style is quite different from Michael's. In the words of one employee, "She's becoming more of a coach, instead of a general."
In 2004, Rick Hendrick, owner of the NASCAR racing operation Hendrick Motorsports, lost most of his management team in a plane crash. Among those killed was his brother and his only son, Ricky, whom Hendrick had been grooming to take over the business. Yet this devastating accident would inspire everyone in the company to fight harder, and would transform Hendrick into a wiser leader.